Page 54
Our answers to these questions are always tentative. They are always open to revision as we learn more about the context, and we can nearly always learn more about the material, social, cultural, and historical contexts in which
the words were uttered or written. However, at some point, what we learn may well cease to change our answers to these sorts of questions in a very substantive way.
Our tentative answers are testable in a variety of different ways, including but not exhausted by asking actual and possible producers and receivers what they think remembering that many, but not all, aspects of situated meanings
and cultural models are unconscious; looking at the verbal and non-verbal effects of the language in the present and future; looking at how the past led up to these words and deeds; looking at similar and contrasting uses of
language; and appealing to a wide and diverse array of linguistic and contextual factors, as well as different tools of inquiry, at different levels, that we hope converge on the same answer. These sorts of concerns lead us to issues
about validity, issues which I will take up in Chapter 5, after I have introduced a variety of other tools of inquiry.
3.10 Context: intertextual and historical
The context of an utterance oral or written is everything in the material, mental, personal, interactional, social, institutional, cultural, and historical situation in which the utterance was made that could conceivably influence the
answer to any of the questions in section 3.9. Thus, context is nearly limitless. However, as I pointed out, learning more about what producers and interpreters think, believe, value, and share, and how they are situated materially,
interactionally, socially, institutionally, culturally, and historically will eventually cease to change the sorts of answers to these questions all that much. The answers cease to change because we have reached the limits of what
contextual information was relevant to the producers and interpreters of the utterance or to our research interests.
However, the final question in section 3.9 raises an important issue. Words have histories. They have been in other people’s mouths and on other people’s pens. They have circulated through other Discourses and within other
institutions. They have been part of specific historical events and episodes. Words bring with them as potential situated meanings all the situated meanings they have picked up in history and in other settings and Discourses.
Producers and receivers may know and use only some of these potential situated meanings. They may not activate them or only partially activate them. But such meanings are always potentially open to being activated or more fully
activated. They are like a virus that may remain inactive for a long while, but that is always there and potentially able to infect people, situations, social practices, and Discourses with new situated
Page 55
meanings ironically, the meanings are actually old, but previously unactivated or only partially activated in the Discourse under consideration.
This is the “bite” of theories of “intertextuality.” Any text oral or written is infected with the meanings at least, as potential of all the other texts in which its words have comported. Studying the meaning potential of texts, in this
sense, is an important part of discourse analysis. Such potential situated meanings can have effects even when they are not fully activated by producers and interpreters.
In previous work I have used as an example of such intertextuality a sentence uttered by a scientist during an undergraduate classroom presentation on the neuroanatomy of finches. Let me briefly recap this example here.
In finches, only males sing, not females. The scientist was interested in the way in which the development of the male’s song relates to the structure of its brain. In the course of her presentation, she drew a diagram of the male
finch’s brain on the board. The diagram was a large circle, representing the bird’s brain, with three smaller circles inside it, marked “A,” “B,’’ and “C,” representing discrete localized regions of neurons that function as units in the
learning and production of the male’s song.
When the young bird hears its song in the wild or on tape, it tries to produce the various parts of the song engages in something like “babbling”. As the young bird’s own productions get better and better, the neurons in region A
are “tuned” and eventually respond selectively to aspects of the song the young bird was exposed to and not other songs. The regions marked “B” and “C” also play a role in the development of the song and in its production.
The scientist went on to discuss the relationship between the male’s brain and the hormones produced in the bird’s gonads. The A, B, and C regions each have many cells in them that respond to testosterone, a hormone plentifully
produced by the testes of the male bird.
In this context, the scientist uttered the following sentence: “If you look in the brain [of the finch] you see high sexual dimorphism – ABC regions are robust in males and atrophied or non-existent in females.” The word
“atrophied” in this sentence is a technical term, the correct term required by the current Discourse of biology. Note that one could have viewed the male brain as containing “monstrous growths” and thus as having deviated from the
“normal” female brain. Instead, however, the terminology requires us to see the male brain as having developed fully “robust” and the female brain as having either “atrophied” or failed to develop “non-existent”.
The words “robust” and “atrophied” carry potential situated meanings with them from history. It is not an historical accident that “atrophied” has ended up a technical term for the female finch brain and other similar cases, though
this brain is simply less “localized” in terms of discrete regions like A, B, and C.
Page 56
Females, in medical and biological Discourses in the West from the time of Galen to the present, have been seen as either inferior to males or, at the least, deviant from the male as the “norm” or “fully developed” exemplar of the
species Fausto-Sterling 1985; Laqueur 1990. Rather than retrace this immense history, let me simply point to one very salient moment of it. Consider the following quote from Darwin:
It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and
therefore of a past and lower state of civilization. The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman – whether requiring deep
thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of senses and hands.
1859: 873; see also Gould 1993: 297–368 Though Darwin usually did not himself interpret “evolution” as a linear development upward to “better things,”
many of his followers did Bowler 1990. The competition men have faced in their environments has caused their bodies and brains to “develop’’ further than those of woman, so that it was a commonplace by the nineteenth
century and in the early decades of the twentieth that “anthropologists regard[ed] women intermediate in development between the child and the man” Thomas 1897, cited in Degler 1991: 29. This logic, of course, leads
us to see the whole woman, in body and brain, as an “atrophied” man exactly as Aristotle and Galen did, less developed because less challenged by her environment.
The technical term “atrophied” has its own specific situated meanings in the Discourse of biology. But, thanks to its history, it carries, like a virus, a bevy of additional potential situated meanings and associated cultural models.
While the scientist may be unaware or only partially aware of these meanings and models, they have effects none the less.
For example, there are a nearly limitless number of things worth studying at one time in any science. What gets time, money, and attention – what is seen as normal, natural, and important to study – is, in part, an artifact of the
long histories of words, situated meanings, cultural models, and theories.
The history of females and development could have been different. So too, could the history of brains. This is a part of the story I have left out here, but see Gee 1996. The history of the development of clinical medicine, surgery,
and brain research Star 1989 led to the localized aspects of brains being considered more important for study than the holistic aspects and this, as it happens, is changing a bit in current neuroscience. For one thing, tools existed
for studying isolated neurons, but not for studying large
Page 57
parts of the brain acting in concert tools which now do exist. For another, the emergence of modern medical schools and standardized training give rise to a pedagogical system intolerant of complex pictures of the brain and
happy with localized diagrams that associate each part of the brain with a clear and discrete function however inaccurate many of these diagrams are.
If the history of females, development, and brains had been different, perhaps we would be studying female finches as important sites of holistic brains that represent a form of development, unlike the male’s, that is not overly
specialized and special-purpose. Here, too, important things would have been discovered, just as they have been in the current science of birds and brains. I am not claiming that today’s science is “wrong” and the alternative we
could come up with by imagining a different history is “right.” There are an endless number of facts to be discovered and different routes to the same or similar theories.
Our alternative imaginings simply show us that situated meanings, meaning potential, cultural models, and theories could have been different. Thus, the present is, indeed, partly an artifact of a very specific past. The present is an
outcome of previous situated meanings and cultural models, meanings and models which continue to inhabit the present in more or less overt ways. They always have the potential for further effects in a given Discourse e.g.
someone refers to studies of bird brains and hormones to reinstantiate the “old” story about women as less developed than men.
Page 58
4 Cultural models
4.1 Bachelors
